The verdict is sad but unavoidable. Poor Things is a 141-minute mistake.

In the important things, in all the ways that really count, Caché is a handsome fraud.

The movie’s failure to engage is illustrated by directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s approach to the climactic scene. They shoot it almost entirely in long shot, as if inviting the audience not to care — or worse, as if admitting there was nothing to care about, after all.

Sirât is a film of impression and feeling, not logic or plot.

The Lighthouse is more than four times longer than a “Twilight Zone” episode, and 100 times worse.

For all the beautiful scenery and Thoreau-like contemplation, Evil Does Not Exist stalls, then implodes.

Petzold said he conceived of the film during the pandemic lockdown — that makes sense, considering the sparseness of the setting and small cast — and was inspired by the character studies of French filmmaker Éric Rohmer and Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Unfortunately, he needed inspiration from another great artist: Christian Petzold.

In the end, Da 5 Bloods feels like a clumsy hybrid of two fine impulses — to make a heist movie set in Vietnam, and to make a statement about race in 2020. Alas, each intention doesn’t serve the other, and so both go unrealized.

While The Assassin is a noble misfire, here’s hoping Hou, who is 68, can saddle up for another ride soon. Another decade would be too long to wait for another vision from this most special director.

This picture is disgusting. [15 Aug 1986]

It is a mess of a film, botched but also misconceived, with a central performance by Natalie Portman that evokes nothing about Jackie Kennedy, beyond the stylish clothes and the secret smoking.

On its own terms, the film is overlong, repetitive and lacks impact. Even if this were the first gorilla-in-love movie ever made, audiences would come away vaguely dissatisfied, suspecting there was an intriguing idea buried somewhere in here, but it didn't quite come off.

Chinese Portrait is a great art installation, but a thoroughly unsatisfying film.

Thinking people also like a little drama with their science fiction. On that score, Annihilation comes up short.

Still, when you’re making a Christian epic and the best thing about it is the guy playing the inquisitor, you have a serious problem.

Things happen in a flat, deadpan way.

Only Lovers Left Alive is simply dead, an exercise in style, bland humor and vague gesture that yet seems to have been made in the naive expectation of a conventional response - that is, of an audience's actually caring.

It’s awful. But it could be where movies are going — into a wasteland.

The movie asks us to wonder what’s real and what’s false, and what it all means. But it goes on for 134 minutes without ever giving viewers a reason to keep watching. Few Netflix customers will make it all the way to the end, and even fewer will be glad they did.

With “After Yang,” the distinctive filmmaker Kogonada has made a movie that is at once ambitious yet timid, asking big questions but providing no answers, not even clues. It’s a thought experiment, but a thought that meanders.

There’s just one big problem here: It Comes at Night is about as enjoyable for the audience as it is for the people in the movie. On both sides of the screen, misery reigns.

Not counting no-budget movies with casts of nonprofessionals, The Humans is one of the worst-directed films in recent memory. It plays like a wicked practical joke or a deliberate act of sabotage.

Noirish thrillers live or die by their plot twists and dialogue -- talk literally being cheap compared to action shots. Unfortunately, the script by first-time filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson fails on both counts.

Logan Lucky is not a contemptible piece of work. It’s a genuine effort by talented people that never quite comes off.

Every so often an obviously talented person makes a bad movie, and that’s what we have in Nope. The talent is there, the movie is dead on the screen.

Women Talking has a remarkable cast — Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, among others — and it’s grounded in dramatic real-life events. But it’s mannered in its conception and wooden in its execution, and has little to do with living, breathing people.

Still, I’m not sure Kiarostami really intended this film to be a movie. It seems more like an art installation. Of note is the terrific sound design; the sound is credited to Ensieh Maleki, who captures full, rich, peaceful sounds of nature.

Seems more appropriate for a science museum than the Metreon, but that's not the film's problem. The problem is that oceanic movies in actual science museums are far more interesting and nuanced than this documentary.